RENO, Nev.—A winter storm packing high winds and potentially several feet of snow blew into the Sierra Nevada on Saturday, triggering thousands of power outages in California, closing a mountain highway at Lake Tahoe and prompting an avalanche warning in the backcountry.
The storm is expected to bring as much as 4 feet (1.2 meters) of snow to the upper elevations around Lake Tahoe by Monday morning, the National Weather Service said.
A 250-mile (400-kilometer) stretch of the Sierra from north of Reno to south of Yosemite National Park was under a winter storm warning at least until Sunday.
“Travel will be very difficult to impossible with whiteout conditions,” the weather service said in Reno, where rain started falling Saturday….